Why did 2024 feel so unreal?

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Weird year. The kind that finds you, come December, cutting open empty beer cans with a kitchen knife and a thousand-yard stare while muttering ​“time is a flat circle.” A lot has happened, it’s true. The UK elected its first Labour Prime Minister since 2005, the US tapped their last President back in for another round, the President of South Korea tried to implement martial law, apologised for causing ​“anxiety” like a celebrity doing Notes App crisis control after posting something sexist, and then got impeached. After fifty years of authoritarian rule over Syria, Bashar al-Assad was overthrown by rebel fighters and fled to exile in Russia. Oasis are back.

At the same time, nothing has changed. Unless your line of work involves securing government contracts, a reshuffle at the ​“top” of society rarely makes much of a difference. Stuff keeps getting more expensive. There’s still black mould in the flat that you pay someone 60% of your wage to live in. Despite overwhelming public protest and the International Criminal Court issuing arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu, former Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant, and Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif, the war in Gaza is ongoing. Every day an endless cavalcade of indignities and atrocities, interrupted only by some deranged news item like ​“a 24-year-old man has been arrested for disorderly conduct at the Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest.”

The sentiment ​“nothing feels real” has permeated 2024, and for good reason. There’s the ongoing problem of fake news combined with the rapid ascent of AI to contend with, which quite literally calls reality into question, but it can’t be overstated how barely believable the news has been this year. The tone was set straight out the gate on January 8, when Hasidic Jewish worshippers were filmed emerging from storm drains in Brooklyn during a clash over tunnels that had been illegally dug beneath a synagogue. From there: enough nonsense to rival a compilation of Chris Morris’s headlines on The Day Today. Five Household Cavalry horses bolted during a routine exercise and trampled through the streets of London covered in blood. A prison officer at HMP Wandsworth went viral for having sex with one inmate in a cell while another inmate filmed it (and, in the middle of doing so, said: ​“gangster, innit. Wallahi”). Lana Del Rey married a Louisiana swamp boat captain. Donald Trump almost got assassinated on the campaign trail – twice. Mike Tyson came out of boxing retirement to fight a YouTuber in diamond-encrusted shorts. Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo did a press junket interview with Out Magazine that felt like watching three hospital patients try to have a conversation on Quaaludes. A 26-year-old Italianx tech bro called Luigi Mangione shot UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson dead at point-blank range while carrying a backpack full of Monopoly money, got dobbed in by someone who works in a Pennsylvanian branch of McDonalds, and instantly became a folk hero.

That’s just a mini-sampler of the full menu of insanity we have been served over the last 12 months, which has given 2024 a sort of hyperreal feel. A girl who became a meme over a blowjob joke has her own cryptocurrency, anything can happen now. Though I suspect what we’re actually experiencing is the true aftermath of the pandemic. It’s nailed on now that any hopes of society emerging from those years of upheaval improved – that we would learn the error of our ways and slow down, consume less, prioritise better – were way off. Looking around, it’s obvious that things got a lot better for, like, six guys, and much, much worse for everybody else. That clash of emotion – rage over incomprehensible short-term idiocy, but also a sense of futility that leaves you with no option but to say ​‘fuck it, we ball’ – has underscored this entire year, and will probably continue into 2025.

There has been a fracture between cause and response. Stupid evil things keep happening, and we simply endure how stupid and evil they are while working 50 hours a week and listening to Brat. There is no coherent logic to anything. No do this, get that. No 2+2=4. As a result, the social contract has broken down. That’s why everyone has responded to the murder of a healthcare CEO with whimsy and delight – fancam edits, lookalike competitions, frilly underwear with ​“deny”, ​“depose”, ​“defend” stitched on the front – and it’s also why a 26-year-old man who could have done anything with his life chose to pick up a gun and murder a healthcare CEO in the first place.

We’re in full Joker mode. We could be told that a comet will hit Earth in two days and our immediate response would be to make it into a meme and, somehow, AI porn. This probably doesn’t bode well for the fabric of society going forward, but at the same time it could have been avoided if people weren’t handing most of their earnings over to medical, energy, and water companies just to have an EpiPen, cook pasta, and get a parasite from swimming in the ocean because it’s full of poo. So, you know… your move, ​“society.”

On the upside, lotta good films! How about Anora, huh? Dune 2! Love Lies Bleeding! The Substance! Rap World! Alien: Romulus! Nosferatu! That Robbie Williams biopic where he’s played by a CGI monkey! Escapism: it is thriving, and thank god. You have to take the Ws where you can find them, and after the dominance of prestige TV in the 2000s and 2010s, it seems 2024 has confirmed that most interesting visual storytelling of this decade is happening back at the box office. So that’s something to look forward to in 2025, especially since January kicks off with the global release of Babygirl – a film containing so many realistic sex scenes that Nicole Kidman asked to pause shooting because ​“I didn’t want to orgasm anymore.” Very promising.

Also, in a few weeks, Trump is going to give Keir Starmer a belittling nickname, and Starmer is going to pretend to find it funny on camera and then go home and repeat it hatefully at himself in the mirror every night. Whatever horrors next year brings, I’m sure that will be of some comfort to us all.

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